I’m not sure if it’s a good time to ask this, but after seeing @mrultra100’s post about the matter, what was your history with the Dr. Crafty show? And what kind of history did you have with the creator?
Ah, I see folks are talking about the whole mess on here now too? (As an important sidenote: I talked about it in length on my Twitter, but I privated my account and don't plan on ever using it again.)
For those who don't know, this is in reference to the Youtuber and VTuber that went by the alias "Dr. Crafty", also known as Alexander "Alex" Tansley.
The short of it is that I used to work for him for around two years and thought of him as a friend - until I reached the point of realizing that something was very wrong with having the man close to myself and my friends.
Basically, after making some fanart of some of the characters from his show, Crafty and I got in contact and it became what I thought was a fun friendship that developed throughout the months. Now I know better and I know he has a pattern of "befriending" people to get things out of them.
Around the end of 2018 I brought up that I'd be happy to help out with his show if he ever needed help… and that lead to me creating all of the "Questionable Qloset" tarot cards. (Which he put up on his Red Bubble without asking me. If there was ever money made with them, I never saw a cut.)
I was not doing well mentally at the time at all, hell, I worked on the tarot cards while being in medical rehab and he still was pushy for me to finish them way earlier than we had agreed on. But at this point I am not surprised that he took avantage of my less than great mental state. It seems to be a pattern for him, having read several testimonies.
That work unfortunately also lead to me being one of the absolutely overworked employees during the creation of the "I Need A Hero Academia" finale for his show. I was tasked to colour, shade and add effects to the storyline bits of one full episode of that three-part finale, and some bits in the third episode, along with coloring two short animations. Close to 200 illustrations coloured. 90 bucks for all of that work. And burned out at the end of it all. A nightmare.
I also was responsible for designing the Infinia Relics and big villain at the end of the series, but aside from one glimpse of her, that design mostly remained unused.
Along with that I was also partially responsible for the core idea behind "Shakeup Saloon", as I had the idea for the host character - but Crafty took my idea and warped it into something almost unreconizable. He also never credited the person who gave him the idea for the show itself in the first place, Nero (of "ToonGrin"), one of his editiors at the time.
In general, Crafty hated crediting us for all the work we did to make his shows a reality. I had to beg for myself and my co-worker Zaz (who did the lineart I colored) in the finale to be even credited in the last video of the three parter. We didn't even get credited on the video we did the most work on.
So… in general, looking back it was an exhausting work experience.
My personal gripes with him mirror the behavior you might've heard from a multitude of folks on Twitter last month.
Unwanted pushing to do NSFW rp (and me telling him off multiple times, but he would try again multiple times) and trying to do the same with anyone he perceived as female in my private discord server. If you were AFAB, he'd try to slide into your DMs, basically.
Which also goes hand in hand with him completely disreguarding that I am a trans man and drawing me with an hour glass figure and needing to be reminded to not draw me with massive tits. It just felt like if he percieved you as a women, he'd use you for his own entertainment as he saw fit. It just took me too long to realize that. Still, I managed to completely cut contact with him in 2020.
All in all, Crafty was a shitty boss and a creep who pretended to be my friend. And that's all I'll say on that matter on here.
Don't waste your energy on thinking about Crafty.
Support his victims and let them heal.
